By Matthew Dublin
Diagnosing performance issues in an IT infrastructure is never easy and as we’ve seen with the recent Amazon cloud crash, these issues are even more difficult to track in a cloud computing environment. But a new technology by AppNeta may help IT managers better obtain information about servers, networks, and desktop performance.
AppNeta's PathView microAppliance is being touted as an easy-to-use network administration monitoring tool that’s the size of a cell phone. It can be implemented at remote locations where you want to monitor network activity, requires very little power, and uses a standard Ethernet connection. Once the PathView microAppliance is plugged in, it uploads network performance data to an AppNeta cloud server.
John D. Halamka, chief information officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and chief information officer at Harvard Medical School, writes on his blog Life as a Healthcare CIO, “as we all roll out EHRs to small provider offices, often with challenging internet connections, remote monitoring of cloud network performance becomes even more critical… Currently we have deployed these devices at our central EHR private cloud site and two of major remote practices The level of detail and depth of available metrics and reports is amazing. A low cost, zero administration, cloud-based, network sniffer that is truly plug and play. That's cool!”
As the post points out, for electronic health records cloud providers, configuration is simple and you can send it via UPS to a provide practice with installation instructions and gather performance data sans complex onsite network sniffing setups.
